Good Day

Yesterday was the best day I've ever had at work. And by "yesterday" I do mean "Saturday."

"Why was it the best day you had at work?" one who reads this blog on a semi-regular basis might ask. And I will tell the ones who wonder:

My job is like fighting in a war with a new battle every day. In these battles I am never allowed to advance, only hold the line. On the best days, when I come in, everyone on the schedule has shown up for work. They get there on time and they do their jobs. The line is strong and we will not lose any ground. Also, no one calls in sick the for the next day so I don't have to rush around asking nurses if they want overtime or making phone calls asking those at home if they want overtime or hoping that one of the registry nurses will come in. On the best days that doesn't happen.

On normal days, we've taken casualties in the battle and we've called in some reinforcements to help us hold the line. Then the sick calls come in and I rush around medical and make calls so that I can get the reinforcements lined up for the next day to make sure the line in held. During normal days there are several time when it looks like the line might be pushed back, but it isn't. We hold, just barely.

There are too many days, though, where by the time I get to work we've been forced to retreat and regroup. Someone called in sick during the late afternoon or the night and we couldn't fill that hole. We had to spread our line a little thin in that area to make sure it's getting covered by someone or else we fall back so we can, for the day, eliminate that position entirely. It's not an elegant solution, it's not a good solution, but it's a solution that has to happen quite often. These are also the day when I have to deliver the news to nurses that they're going to have some involuntary overtime, either they're going to stay a second shift or be forced to come in early the next morning. I don't force them to stay, I just warn them that they may be forced. I'm sure one can imagine how happy that makes everyone feel.

Real shitty days are the days the line's been bombarded and we lose massive amounts of our people. We call in all the reinforcements we can, but there are still holes. Several nurses get forced into mandatory overtime, but there are still holes. And in the end I am asked what went wrong, why did things go so bad? And all I can blame is the flu or nothing at all.

So, there you have it. Each day I go to work and I fight a battle that I'm not actually allowed to win. Too many extra people wouldn't be cost-effective on the days everyone because those extra people would just stand around and do nothing. So I have to wait until we lose position before any reinforcements can be called in and I have to hope that there'll be enough so that if we have to retreat, we won't have to retreat very far.

"Dear Deer"

No, I think she deserves to have a little more crush.

Obsessive Song: "Walking In Los Angeles"

"I shot a man in Reno."

I don't social media. (Yeah, I blog, but like 10 people read this thing and maybe three semi-regularly comment and one is my brother. Really, this blog is about as social as I am in real life.) Nearly three years ago, I killed my Facebook and MySpace accounts, among others. I didn't get the point and found myself feeling obligated for keeping the things updated because they were supposedly about keeping in touch with people. I never like the places, but I had joined anyway because that's what we're supposed to do, right?

Since my sister-in-law and brother had their daughter I seen my mother use her Facebook nearly every day. At first she mostly checked for new baby pictures because the two "grown-ups" in the growing family were pretty crappy about e-mailing pictures of the baby, but it seemed like a new photo of her appeared on Facebook each day. Now my mom uses Facebook to play games mostly.

In November, Heels basically announced that she's not going to blog anymore. Nothing to post, she said. Didn't like worrying about having content to post, she said. And I get that. In the past three and a half month I've posted like a dozen times. (I did way better when I had to e-mail posts in from work because I couldn't get to Blogger.) The difference between me and her, though, is that she still posts stuff to Facebook, probably to Twitter, too, but that's blocked to outsiders. (Okay, her Facebook is blocked, too, but my mom is a friend of Heels and every now and then my mom fills me in on what Heels has posted there. Creepy.)

The thing is, she makes announcements there. The last one that I read was that the Heels/Logic family has found a place to live up in Portland. That couldn't have been a blog post?

I don't mean to pick on Heels. She's my friend and has been for a long time and hopefully will for a long, long time. It's just knowing that there are these bits of information that I can't get to, but could. I could if only I re-joined Facebook or got a Twitter account. It's just that easy. I know it is. And I don't have to do anything, really, except friend the people I want to friend and anger/disappoint the people I don't friend. Hell, I wouldn't have to twit. I wouldn't have to put up a picture of myself and I could ignore the kittens that are thrown at my wall. And I'd still get to see what my friends have to say.

The problem is they never say enough. Not for me, at least. I want to know more than just the 140 (or whatever) characters. I don't like the bullshit of the "liking" of the posts. (Seriously, someone writes that his 15-year old cat died and 37 people "like" it? What the fuck?) The discourse under a post seems to be people saying the exact same thing in different ways. That's not communication. I don't know what it is, but it's not really communicating with each other. It's like people are shortening their thinking into bumper sticker length thought and then setting out to find other people to agree with them. (And help then grow people in Farmville or doing "jobs" in Mafia Wars or whacking things in Bush Whacker.) What is that, really? Is it something that I want?

No. I don't think I do. I don't want to think in snippets. It's bad enough that I think I think in paragraphs rather than essays, I don't want that shortened to thinking in only sentences.

I'm not going to rejoin Facebook. I'm not going to join Twitter. I'm going to continue to miss what little people are saying and I really do miss it. But social media just isn't for me. Not at this point. Maybe if I ever start my own business. Yeah, probably then.

Apologies About Me

Part of me feels like I should apologize for that last sentence of the last post I wrote. I should apologize because I really do want the peoples out there who happen to read this to have a happy new year. I hope they did. Doesn't change how I feel about my job or where my life is at the moment or the whole new year thing in general, but I do know that the new year stuff isn't really about me. (Although I'm sort of in the mood where I sometimes think it should be only about me.)

So, I hope yours was nice. I hope that if you're up before six in the morning it's because you never went to sleep last night.